


And the story is this

by skitzofreak



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: F/M, In Which We Recall That The Heroine Had More Than One Parent, Jyn appreciation week, Star Wars Mother appreciation, aggressive headcanons for a canon planet, as more than a backstory element, probably not Catalyst complaint, still dead but at least we're talking about her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-08
Updated: 2018-06-08
Packaged: 2019-05-19 21:38:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14881685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skitzofreak/pseuds/skitzofreak
Summary: The geologist walked for a long, long time,her memory murmurs, and she feels the warmth of phantom fingers tracing through her messy hair, parting the strands for braiding.A long, long time, following the song in her heart.





	And the story is this

**Author's Note:**

> I have not read Catalyst, but I am aware that I drift off from the canon here with Lyra’s background.
> 
> I also understand that Aria Prime is an agricultural planet in canon, but all the wiki says is that Lyra’s mother was an artist on it. So here’s how I imagine it. (What is an “agricultural planet” anyway? I refuse to believe it means the entire planet is just wheat fields and a few gas stations or whatever. The USA has over [4 million square kilometers of farmland](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.AGRI.K2?view=chart), and yet I’m pretty sure we’re not known around the world as “an agricultural country.”)

It turns out that Jyn might have living family in the galaxy. Or at least, that’s what the Alliance records imply, although apparently the operatives assigned to building the file on her family never looked too far into the details.

 _Jyn’s_  never looked too far into the details. She never even considered it, honestly. As far as she's ever been concerned, it's a dead end line of thought.

So she’s not really considering it now, either. No matter how many sideways looks her partner throws her from the pilot’s chair as he settles their U-Wing into the dock.

“Sunset is roughly twelve hours from now,” Cassian says in his careful voice, his eyes trained on the console as he runs through the shut down procedures for the U-Wing.

Jyn nods.

The console goes dark, the ship whining and whispering as the hull cools after their atmo-entry. Cassian’s hands drift across the console again anyway, in the shut-down pattern, checking that he secured everything properly. He always does that, but today his hand move just slow enough that she can tell he’s not doing it entirely for the sake of thoroughness. “So I’ll see you on the ship then, yes?”

She nods again.

“If there’s somewhere else you would like to meet instead,” he adds after a beat, and she thinks a touch sourly that if his voice were any more light and casual he might float out the hatchway. “Just comm me, alright?”

Jyn grunts an affirmative.

Cassian’s hands hover over the console, but there’s only so long even he can stall over an unpowered screen, so he drops them into his lap and runs his palms up his thighs for a moment.

Jyn watches his knuckles flex for a moment on his knees, feels a faint pang of irritation and embarssment at his obvious concern. She’s being rotten to him, and he doesn’t deserve it. Worse, there’s no reason for it. This place is just…it’s only that she’s a little thrown by…she’s never even been here. Hells, until about a year ago, when Cassian showed her the file the Alliance (that Cassian) had compiled on her family, Jyn hadn’t even  _known_  her mother was from Aria Prime.

They’d never talked about it. Jyn remembers bedtime stories and silly stories over meals and Mama would make funny voices for the characters and always spend too much time describing the scenery - especially the rocks, what kinds of soil the characters were standing on – but never once in all those many stories had Lyra Erso ever told Jyn anything about the scenery of her own childhood, the characters that made up her life before Papa and Jyn and oh, hells, her eyes are stinging, just a little.

Jyn grimaces, scrunching up her face and scowling fiercely at Cassian’s hands, which have gone still on his legs.

“Jyn,” he says in a softer tone, and she closes her eyes, breathes in, two, three, four, like Chirrut told her, and out, two, three, four, five. “You don’t have to go,” Cassian says into the silence, his voice still careful but now a little warmer, a little kinder, too kind, and her eyes grow heavy and hot again. “You can come with me to the dead drop, or,” warm fingers against her cheek bone, brushing back her hair from her eye, always so gentle with her whenever he had the chance, “you can wait on the ship, if you don’t want to go out there at all.”

Sure, just huddle here on the U-Wing with the viewports covered, avoiding even a glance at her mother’s homeworld. Unfortunately, a small, cowardly part of her actually really likes the sound of that, is already ticking off all the things she could be doing in the ship to get them prepped for the next leg of this trip while Cassian’s out and working. And she knows he would never say a word about it, nor judge her for the choice. (He refused a mission to Carida, a few months ago, and that night Jyn let him bury his face against her stomach and lay in silence for a long time.)

It would be easy to stay on the ship and hide, so of course Jyn leans her cheek into his hand and opens her eyes just enough to glower at him through her lashes.  _“Your teeth to grow inward and bite your internal organs,”_  she grumbles in Huttese, reaching down and checking that her blaster was secure in her belt without looking.

The flat lines of Cassian’s neutral spy mask soften (and she’s angry at herself all over again for making him feel like he has to put on the mask and tiptoe around her stupid feelings).  _“Mating flurrgs to croak in your ears forever,”_  he replies mildly, his thumb tracing an arc down her cheek to the corner of her lips.

Jyn snorts and turns her head just enough that his thumb brushes her lips as she speaks. “Flurrgs sound like banthas with diarrhea during mating season. You are fucking evil, Andor.”

“Your Hutt accent’s getting better,” he replies. “I have to step up my game to keep up.”

Jyn laughs a little at that, and opens her eyes fully, noting for the first time that he’s moved to kneel at the side of her chair. (Again, a surge of guilt – his back is healed but prolonged sleeping in the hard U-Wing fold-out bunk aggravates the implants, and kneeling is stiff and uncomfortable for him. She needs to get a grip on herself and stop making him worry.) “I’m fine,” she says as firmly as she can muster. “I’ll only be a few hours. It’s just a…” she shakes her head. “I’ll be fine.”

“I know,” he lets his hand linger a moment longer on her cheek, and then Cassian leverages himself up, his fingertips trailing along her jawline before dropping away. “I’ll keep my comm open.”

“Twelve hours,” she calls after him, “Chrono’s running.” He pauses at the door, glances back over his shoulder at her. She doesn’t tack on the second half of that sentence any more, the way she used to a year ago when they were just starting out as partners in Rebel Intelligence:  _if you’re not back, I will come looking for you._ She doesn’t have to say it out loud anymore, she simply tilts her head and meets his eye for a moment, waits for him to nod in acknowledgement.

“Keep your comm open,” is all he says, and then he opens the port-side hatch and jumps lightly to the ground. Bright pinkish-yellow light floods the interior of the U-Wing, and a chorus of faint windchimes filters through the roar of various engines taking off and landing in the space port around them. Cassian slaps the door lock behind him, and Jyn is shut into the quiet dimness of the U-Wing, alone with her thoughts.

She’s out of her seat in seconds, the silence already crushing.

She’s only going to ask one question, anyway. Just one question. What harm could it do?

Jyn runs a quick check of her gear (kyber necklace, knife in each sleeve and the back of her belt, blaster in her holster, derringer blaster in her right boot, scandocs in her vest pocket, comm on her collar, spare comm in her left boot nestled next to the spare scandocs, truncheon on her right thigh, and…something else, what else?...oh, right, U-Wing key.)

Jyn wraps her fingers around her kyber crystal for a final moment, then tucks it carefully under her shirt and hits the hatch release.

The pinkish-gold light of Aria Prime blinds her for a moment, the dry and slightly salty air stings at her nose, and then she blinks and steps out of the ship and into the city where her mother was born.

Jyn walks to the northern gate of the space port, and makes her best effort at looking bored and uninterested in her surroundings (and therefore uninteresting to anyone who might be watching her). Despite herself, though, Jyn feels her breath catch a little when she clears the high wall of the port and gets her first real look at the city before her.

It’s built into a massive volcano, long dormant but still bearing the marks of violent eruptions long ago. Officially, it’s named Celestine Imperial Trade Port, Aria Prime’s capital and largest trade center in the Japreal sector, and it’s only a day’s jump from Onderon along the Trellen Trade Route. (Perhaps that was how Lyra met Saw Gerrera, perhaps he came here to trade for weapons or food or…but even Cassian hadn’t been able to find a single piece of the puzzle that explained Lyra’s friendship with a notorious rebel guerilla fighter, and Jyn never asked Saw, never asked her mother, and it’s not the question she came here to ask because there’s no one left to answer.

And anyway, it doesn’t matter.)

In the briefing for this mission, Cassian had tagged a footnote under the city name, one of the little messages he left for her whenever he made her a personal copy of one of his reports, adding detail to her understanding of both the place and her partner.  _Most locals call it Sapphire City, because dark blue rocks are apparently considered more valuable than light blue rocks._

Sapphire City. Something about the name tugs at her suddenly, a vague sense that she’s heard it somewhere before, heard it and cared about it. Perhaps…perhaps it had been in one of Mama’s stories. Perhaps, though the words “Aria Prime” had never crossed her mother’s lips in Jyn’s memory, the stories had still somehow been about, well, this place. Lyra’s home, from before.

Jyn swallows, stretches her legs out as she walks briskly into the flow of traffic, and forces herself to stop thinking of the past and focus on the splendor before her.

And splendor it truly is. Long ago, long after the volcano went silent, some terrible force cracked the mountain open from the peak to nearly the base, leaving a huge rift. But while the outside stones of the mountain are a dusty, uninteresting grey with only occasional bands of green and pink foliage, the inside turned out to be an enormous crystal fissure, like a geode on massive scale. The Ariasi people discovered that the pale blue stones were easy to carve but durable enough to support whole buildings, and they promptly burrowed into the shining depths.  _(Historical records claim this led to the direct devaluation of celestine in the galaxy_ , Cassian’s footnotes told her,  _because the rich don’t want it if there’s enough for everyone.)_  In the last few centuries, the Ariasi perfected the art of growing new crystals from the seeded stones of the mountain, and so they spread their crystalline houses down into the valley at the foot of Celestine Port. The pale blue buildings Jyn looks at now were not so much built, she understands, as they were grown into the rounded shapes that surround her. From the space port gates, Jyn thinks that the city outskirts look like a thousand giant rounded sapphires dropped in a pile by some careless giant. The structures become spikier, though, more faceted, and significantly deeper in blue color as they grow upward into the mountain - until at last, like some centerpiece jewel in the peak of a queen’s crown, a deep blue palace stabs from the peak of the mountain into the gold colored sky. The hollow crystal spike at the top is known as The Palace of Celestial Dreams ( _brings in more tourists than “Big Blue Rock Tower,”_  Cassian noted in her briefing), and it gleams with the reflected light of the yellow sun.

The overall effect is of an enormous frozen waterfall cascading out of the mountain and flooding the valley below. And since most of the businesses in Celestine like to hang multi-colored crystal windchimes from every eave of their structures, there is a constant stream-like chiming and ringing that blends into a flowing river of tinkling music to match the way the light flashes endlessly across the faceted sides of the buildings.

There’s no other word for it, really. In every sense of the word, Celestine  _glitters._

It looks like something out of a child’s tale. It looks like something out of Mama’s stories.

Jyn snorts a little, and dodging around a man with a tightly braided topknot wrapped in a blue ribbon. Of course it looks like something from Mama’s stories _._  Lyra Erso was born here, lived in one of the paler blue buildings around the edges of the valley’s sprawling city, and somewhere in that mountain’s heart she met Galen Walton, who married her a few months later.

 _The story is this, dearest, that once upon a time there was a young geologist who fell in love with a scientist who was sweet and brilliant and kind_  -

The whisper in her ear catches her off guard, and Jyn freezes. A Human fem with decoratively golden braids walks into her shoulder and then stumbles, muttering an automatic apology to Jyn as she moves around, but Jyn doesn’t catch the words and doesn’t return the polite gesture.

Instead, she finds herself staring at the woman’s hair as she walks on ahead and turns to vanish into the growing crowd. The woman has coiled her blonde hair into some sort of crown, except instead of tucking the braided ends up neatly, this woman has let them hang down her back in two swinging tails, and woven colorful ribbons with tiny sparkling gems embedded in them throughout the style.

Mama used to braid Jyn’s hair every morning, a meticulous and comfortable ritual between them. But…Mama never braided her own hair at all, or at least Jyn can’t remember it, no matter how hard she strains to dredge up a clear picture of her mother’s face (a clearer picture than the one framed by tall green grass and black rocks and a man all in white, anyway). It seems suddenly odd to her, that Mama’s hair was always messy and carelessly tied back, when all around Jyn now are carefully styled braids and knots, beaded chiffons and precariously heavy-looking multi-braid topknots. It’s not just the fem-presenting locals, either, but Humans of every gender work lovely designs into their hair and decorate them with ribbons and dyes and, above all, crystals. Glinting gems (real or fake, she doesn’t think it matters) wink and shine at her from every head, hairclips and ribbons and beads braided in, everyone shimmering like they were also cut from the heart of the crystal mountain.

In this crowd, Jyn’s simple bun marks her as the outsider. For the first time in her life, she wishes she had done something with her hair before she left the ship. (Hadn’t there been a note in her brief? “Alderaanian culture has left it’s mark on the planet and people,” and Cassian’s terse addition just for her:  _a common occurrence.)_

Jyn tells herself brusquely to stop staring at the scenery and heads for the mountain. She’s not here to sight-see. She’s here to…well…it’s not really business but it’s not something she can just ignore, so…  _de nar ere’bus haalas,_ _fine, she’s here to snoop around in her mother’s past because her father’s was erased out of existence by the Empire years ago and Cassian told her there was a chance she might have living family on Aria Prime. If she does, their names will be recorded in the official census records in the heart of the mountain._

She doesn’t, of course. Have family on Aria Prime.  She  _doesn’t_. And it wouldn’t matter if she did. If Lyra left anyone behind on Aria Prime, they certainly never did a thing for Jyn, they just left her in Saw Gerrera’s care and probably thought no more of her. Hells, her own mother loved her (she’s almost sure of it), and even she left Jyn, in the end, left her to run back and die in a field in a pointless attempt to save her husband instead.

A local with a sparkling headband around their triple braid glances up at Jyn’s face as they pass and stumbles, clearly taken aback at her expression. Jyn jerks her head away and forces her shoulders to drop and her jaw to unclench. There might be people on this planet who are related to her by blood, but that’s not the same thing as having family, and she doesn’t care enough to find them anyway. She’s only doing this because…it’s just…Cassian had told her they were stopping by Aria Prime while they were slipping into bed, the lights already off and the chrono set for their departure. She’d lain next to him and found his hand in the dark and he’d suddenly whispered  _you might have family there, Jyn_.  _They might be able to give you_ …he paused, licked his lips,  _answers._

His voice was soft, but there was a dark edge to it, and a longing that twisted up her stomach and into her chest and nearly made her gasp with the intensity of it.

 _Guess I can look into it_ , she said before she could think it through, and his hand had tightened around hers for a moment before he reeled her under the covers and settled her against his chest.

And so here she was, walking into the great stone arch at the base of the mountain, following signs to the Census Bureaus.

She could always just tell him there was no one in the register. She was the last Erso, the name would probably die with her, and the galaxy would be all too glad to forget it.

Hells, her parents left Aria Prime before Lyra was pregnant. No one on this planet probably even knows Jyn was ever  _born._

 The inside of the mountain is less overwhelmingly sparkly than the rest, Jyn notes as she rides a streamlined monorail through what looks like a business district before it dumps her out between a set of flat-cut apartment buildings and a small administrative center. She’s relatively far into the bottom of the fissure, where the sun doesn’t quite reach and the streets aren’t as crowded or well maintained. The blue stone buildings look duller, more greyish blue and only a few have faceted angles cut into them to make them shine. The Census Bureau, she gathers, isn’t as high on the list for tourist destinations. Granted, there is an interesting cave opening embedded in the mountain side just behind the nearest apartment building; she can see a few local kids playing in the entrance just under a crude carving of a krayt dragon. But no lines form outside the relatively narrow opening, and trash piles listlessly around the old, worn picnic tables someone set up nearby.

The people she sees walking around here still have their hair up in braids or buns, but the decorative accessories are significantly smaller and less eye catching. Jyn feels some of the tension in her spine relax a little. This is where the poorer inner-city families live; she’ll blend in here much better than she could ever hope to out in the bright, colorful lights of the bustling commercial centers. All she has to do is –

_And one day the young geologist screwed up her courage, and went into the krayt dragon’s cave, passing under the beast’s stony stare._

Jyn’s heart thumps heavily in her chest as her memory catches up to her mental scan of the area.

She knows this story.

She knows this  _place_. A thread of familiarity twined with unease winds through her chest and tightens around her heart. How many of Mama’s stories had featured the cave with the krayt dragon? How many times had Jyn imagined that one of those mythical beings guarded their own little shelter in the foothills?

Perhaps it’s only a coincidence that she’s found one here, on this planet, in this city.

Perhaps it isn’t.

Jyn cranes her head back and looks up at the dragon, notes that the eyes were once painted red but the paint on the left eye has been scratched, making it look like the dragon is squinting at her. It turns the already fierce, snarling mouth into a sort of sneer. The dragon, she thinks, is mocking her.

“Not a good place, stranger,” says a thin voice, and Jyn shies to the side, realizing a moment late that someone has walked up to her. It’s a kid, ten or eleven, bright red beads strung in each of her tiny dark braids that click and clack as she tilts her head at Jyn. One of the kids playing in the entrance. The rest seem to have left, but this girl lingers, playing with her beaded hair idly as she scans the intruder. “I said, not a good place,” the kid repeats slowly, as if she thinks Jyn is too stupid to follow otherwise. “People see weird stuff in there.”

Jyn opens her mouth to tell the kid to kriff off, not liking the way the she eyes Jyn’s pockets. “Like what?” she asks instead.

The local girl shrugs. “Weird stuff.”

“Its not marked as off limits,” Jyn points at the krayt dragon carved over the entrance. “So anyone can go in, right?”

The girl scoffs. “Yeah, sure. If you’re dumb.”

Jyn shrugs, and pushes past the kid (making sure her pockets don’t get anywhere near those restless little fingers), headed for the entrance. Her fingertips trace over her comm for a moment, but Cassian’s busy right now, and anyway, she’s just going to glance in. If it reminds her too much of…if it’s too dark or confining, she can just walk back out. She’s fine. She can handle this.

“Hey,” the kid calls out to her back. “What’s your story, anyway?”

Jyn glances back over her shoulder more out of surprise than any desire to answer. The kid points at her hair. “No parent braids,” she says derisively. “No sib braids. No status, no pronouns, no decos at all. Just…” she makes a vague gesture at her own hair, then Jyn’s. “ _Mess_. You dress like an off-worlder but your face looks shiny.”

That stops Jyn, and she half turns to look back. “Shiny?”

The girl rolls her eyes. “Local,” she says, again using that slow, talking-to-idiots voice.

And what the hells does  _that_ look like? She doesn’t ask (asking is dangerous when you aren’t sure you want the answer), instead she just shrugs again and turns away, headed for the cave.

“You’ll go cracked in there, stranger!” The kid shouts after her, sounding quite cheerful about it. “Craaaaacked!”

Jyn passes under the stony eye of the krayt dragon, and doesn’t look back.

It’s surprisingly light inside, flickering but functional sconces embedded every few meters in the walls, and the crystal walls are dull but still reflective enough that the clench of shivering memory in her belly fades quickly enough. (This is not Lah’mu, she is not trapped in the dark, not any more, not ever again.) The cave floor slopes downward towards two branching tunnels. Jyn considers, but they both look identical from here, so she picks left on a whim and keeps going.

It’s quiet in the cave, no sounds but the faint crunch of her boots on the gravel and the rhythm of her breath.

 _The geologist walked for a long, long time_ , her memory murmurs, and she feels the warmth of phantom fingers tracing through her messy hair, parting the strands for braiding.  _A long, long time, following the song in her heart._

Jyn bites her lip and glances back, but no one has followed her into the cave. No one is looking at her. She’s…well, not safe, she knows what that feels like now and it’s not this tension strung down her back and shivering in her belly, but there is no immediate or obvious threat, at least. So she stops walking, pulls her kyber necklace out from her collar, and closes her eyes.

Now there is no sound in the cave but her breathing, in, out, in, out, and the faint rush of blood in her ears.

Jyn snarls and opens her eyes, feeling stupid.

Her mother is standing across the cave.

Jyn jolts backwards, the hard crystal wall slamming into her shoulder blades and knocking the breath from her lungs. Or her mother did. No, that’s ridiculous, her mother is  _dead_ and the cave is empty. It’s empty, nothing but shadows and glinting stones and her own thundering heart. She must have just seen her own reflection in the wall across the way, distorted by the flickering lights and her own imagination.

Her kyber crystal is warm against her throat, against her clenched fingers, and the cave wall is cool on her back. Jyn takes a deep breath and lets her head fall back. It might not even be the same cave. There were probably a lot of caves with krayt dragon statues over the entrance. In a place known as the Sapphire City. Where her mother grew up. It’s just a coincidence, and her mind is supplying…more.

Something rattles to her right, the faint clatter of small stones falling on large ones. Jyn goes still, as still as a thief who hears the owner’s footsteps, as still as a rebel spy who glimpses a stormtrooper in the crowd. The sound does not repeat, but when she looks out of the corner of her eye –

It’s a child, a little girl who looks about three or four years old, with two dark braids down her back and a neat blue and pink robe. Pink ribbons are woven into the braids. She is dragging her small hands through the dirt, happily picking up stones from the floor and holding them up to the light. After a careful inspection of each one, she brings each stone down, presses a solemn kiss to the rough surface, and then drops it carefully into her lap. There is already quite a pile of stones forming in the hollow of her knees, caught in the skirt. As Jyn watches, the girl lets out a small, delighted squeal and holds up an almost perfectly round stone with triumph, turning it this way and that to admire it. This stone is granted two kisses, one on each side, and the little girl tucks it carefully into a pocket instead of adding it to the pile.

The whisper in the back of her mind is so sudden and abrupt that Jyn almost turns around to look for the speaker.  _The story is this, dearest, that there was once a tiny planet no bigger than a pebble, and one day a brave little adventurer found the planet and made friends with all the little people upon it._

(It was one of her favorite stories for awhile, the tale of the tiny planet and the only girl who could hear the people on it. Six year old Jyn liked the idea of a world she could carry in her pocket.

 _Me too, dearest,_  Mama smiles and brushes a hand down her tight braids.  _I always did_.)

“Hey,” Jyn tries to call out, but her throat is dry and tight and her voice comes out as a croak. She pushes herself off the wall toward the child, but then she blinks and the cave is empty again.

The cave is empty and her kyber crystal is warm against her fingers.

She should leave. Go to the Census Bureau and ask for the name records, or just…just go back to the ship. Cassian won’t even ask, if she doesn’t bring it up. He won’t call her insane, either, if she tells him about, well, any of this. He doesn’t think much of the Force, she knows, but he’s been around Chirrut awhile, and met Luke Skywalker at least a few times. He survived Scarif. He’ll understand.

Jyn brings her crystal up and presses the edge against her lower lip.

Then she walks further into the cave.

Some of the lights down here have burned out, and Jyn sees a few random food wrappers and broken bottles carelessly discarded here and there. A teenager hang out, or a temporary shelter for the homeless, perhaps. The gravel begins to fade here, leaving a rough but unbroken stone floor behind. Jyn can’t tell for sure the precise color of the stone around her anymore, the poor light turning it darker and somehow deeper. She feels like she’s walking over a solidified void. But the path stays wide and the ceiling is high, and there is still enough light that she can push back the memories of the cave on Lah’mu, the bunker on Tamsye Prime, the solitary confinement cells of the various prisons she’s endured. So Jyn walks on.

_The story is this, dearest, that one day a great woman fell ill and died, and her wife gave her body back to the stone but her daughter could not accept the loss, so in her fury and grief –_

“She went back to the cave and asked the krayt dragon for a boon,” Jyn whispers into the silence of the cave, because she remembers this one, too. Out of the corner of her eye, she can just see a girl of roughly twelve or thirteen with dark hair, standing with her fists clenched as she glares upwards at a looming stone dragon. Her twin braids are now decorated with deep red ribbons, and the two tails are woven together at the end to form one distinct and complex braid. Her clothes, however, are simple black, and filthy around the hem. She looks furious, and scared, and her eyes are rimmed as red as her hair ribbons.

(Jyn never really liked this story as much – it was so sad. Maybe that’s why she can’t remember what the girl asked for, or how the dragon answered. All she remembers is how angry the girl was in the story, how sad her Mama was when she told it.)

There’s a rusty sign nailed into the wall near a sputtering light sconce:

  _ß_ _Lake Of Clouds_

_Hall Of The Blue Giant_ _à_

Jyn blinks hard and reads it twice, focusing on it intensely to avoid noticing that the angry girl is gone.

(If she’s gone.)

The kyber in her palm is now warmer than her body heat can explain. Jyn doesn’t bother to try. Instead, she turns and walks to the right, toward the Hall Of The Blue Giant.

“The giant had a great stone head, and a great stone heart,” Jyn murmurs as she walks around the corner and the cave opens up suddenly into a large roundish room. In almost the exact center of the room looms an enormous dark blue pillar, thinnest in the middle. Stalactites, she recalls with a flash of pleased surprise. Rock formations that grow down from the cave and then touch the bottom. Or they grew up from the bottom to touch the top? Something…something like that. Mama used to love them, had all kinds of pictures in her holofiles of big famous caves with dozens and dozens of what looked like jagged stone teeth jutting up (or down?) and filling the caves around them like an eerie frozen mouth.

This one, however, seems to be the only one in this particular part of the cave, just one huge blue pillar, holding up the ceiling. Or pinning down the floor, Jyn thinks with a faint smile, and then frowns, because that joke sounds like something she heard once. Papa, maybe, had cracked that one when Mama was telling the story of the Blue Giant who-

 _He told the angry girl that she must travel to the land of the wise ones, and learn from them the power of the Force of others,_  Mama says, as a teenage girl leans against the Blue Giant with her arms crossed, indifferent to her braided bun falling partially out as she leans her head back against the stone. She’s still wearing black, but there is a slash of red around her waist now, and red in her hair, though the ribbons look a little frayed.

“Did it speak to you?” Jyn asks, or thinks, or screams across the distance to the girl by the pillar.  “Did it really speak to you, or was that just a story?”

The girl doesn’t answer. A moment later the light flickers, and she’s gone.

Jyn lets the kyber around her neck drop to the end of the cord. It’s warm enough that she can feel it radiating through her shirt and into her chest now. There must be kyber in this cave, she decides. Perhaps it’s under the celestine crystals, perhaps it’s even embedded in fragments throughout – Chirrut told her once that sort of thing could happen, and it diluted the power of the kyber but did not negate it entirely. She wishes a little bitterly that this cave had some kind of warning tacked up at the entrance. Then again…there had been the krayt dragon, traditionally a symbol of danger in this sector of space. And then there had been the obnoxious kid. And Jyn’s own sense of unease.

Not that any of that stopped her. Not that a sign would have stopped her either.

Still, it would have been nice to have a little warning.

Jyn lets her steps guide her without much care for where she’s going, though she pauses every now and again to check that her comm still picks up signal. No messages from Cassian, so he’s probably still busy with the dead drop. It’s an old alias he keeps on this planet, inherited from an older spy who played his aunt for awhile until she passed the reigns of this system’s network to him. They haven’t worked out how to introduce Jyn to his cover yet, so he’s handling the business alone. She doesn’t like it much but it’s the most practical -

 _And then one day she met a scientist_ , Mama whispers,  _and nothing was ever quite the same again for her._

Jyn’s throat is tight again and her eyes sting suddenly, because Papa is kneeling in the gravel before her, gravely examining the wall, his face clean shaven and thoughtful. Behind him a young woman in black and red robes, her hair braided into a practical crown with only a single red ribbon woven through hovers. She wears heavy workman’s gloves and holds a small rock hammer and a pick, and there is a box of carefully labelled samples at her feet. Papa points to a spot on the wall, and the woman – Mama – kneels at his side and carefully taps something out of the it. The chunk of rock falls into his waiting palm, and he holds it up between them. The light catches the stone and sends a little burst of rainbow mist shimmering around his hand. Jyn can’t hear what he says next, but Mama grins and her dust-speckled cheeks turn pink.

Oh fuck, they look so  _young_. They can’t be much older than she is, now, maybe about Cassian’s age. But when Galen Walton puts the shimmering crystal in Lyra Erso’s hand, she blushes like a girl and holds it tightly to her chest. When Lyra leans forward and presses a brief kiss to Galen’s cheek, he closes his eyes and holds his breath, leaning towards her with such obvious yearning that Jyn turns her head. She can’t…she doesn’t want to…

She doesn’t dare to look back until the burning in her eyes fades.

“What about the rest?” She demands into the silence of the cave. “What about…whoever taught her about the Force? And going to school? She went to, to school,” Jyn’s voice cracks a little, and she stops and grinds her teeth together. “Wasn’t there more for her than…?” She trails off, because the answer, of course, is  _no_. Lyra Erso played in a cave full of shiny crystals, she lost someone she loved and was angry, she went away, she came back, she met a man, she left. That’s all the cave knows. Jyn knows only a little bit more (she had a daughter, she ran back, she died.) The Census Bureau will probably know even less than the cave.

If the cave only shows the things that happened here, then there’s nothing more to learn from it. It can’t tell her if Lyra Erso had other family, or whether she ever told them about her daughter if she did, or why she left her daughter alone to run back and die with her husband.

Jyn slams her fist sideways into the cave wall, and then deliberately turns and marches back the way she came. This was a stupid idea. There’s nothing for her here.

Mama is huddled on the floor in front of her.

Jyn stops short, all the air punched from her lungs, because it’s not a young girl with a familiar face, it’s  _Mama_ , her hair a messy tangle and her black and red robes a bit dusty, her little rock hammer tucked into her sash. Her face is lined and tired, her eyes wet, and in her lap –

It’s a girl, four years old, with two neat braids woven with green ribbon. The ribbons looks brand new, the girl’s clothes look cute and mass manufactured and impractical. The little girl looks clean and neat, with a little green and pink rucksack on the ground by Mama’s feet that implies she was recently in school.

The little girl – Jyn – is asleep, curled up in Mama’s lap with her chubby fingers wrapped tight around Mama’s necklace. Mama strokes her hair gently, leans her head against the stone wall, and stares into the flickering light.

 _The story is this, dearest_ , whispers in Jyn’s memory,  _that once there was a geologist who loved her family very much, but she also loved the whole galaxy._

A man approaches the woman and her child, and Jyn nearly gasps aloud because he’s huge and threatening in his massive armor, but Saw Gerrera drops to Lyra’s side and puts a heavy hand on her shoulder, and his eyes are unbearably kind. She almost doesn’t know him, in that moment, does not recognize the softness of his expression.

Saw’s lips move, and Jyn blinks rapidly to clear her eyes so she can read what he’s saying. … _great sacrifice_ , he says (Jyn almost laughs then, because it’s Saw,  _it’s Saw_ , of course he’s talking about sacrifice),  _and were there a choice, I would never allow anyone to ask this of you._

Lyra nods, and her mouth moves but her head is turned away and Jyn can’t understand it, doesn’t dare move closer in case they vanish into dust and light and leave her alone in this empty cave with only her bitterness and her questions.

 _Lyra_ , Saw says when she is done,  _Lyra, you know what the Empire would do, had they Galen’s mind at their disposal._

She nods, and Jyn’s heart is a hammer against her ribs. (In her memory, a planet screams as it is torn to shreds around her.)

 _If they come_ , Saw is saying, or she thinks he’s saying, because he tilts his chin down and closes his eyes for a moment, but then he looks up at Lyra again with a new light in his eyes and  _this_  Saw, Jyn recognizes. This one, she knows.  _If they come_ , he tells her mother, who cuddles her daughter close to her chest in obvious misery,  _you must save us all_.

And then he hands her a blaster.

Lyra takes it.

Lyra nods.

In her lap, her daughter stirs, and looks up, and Saw nods to the child gravely as her mother tucks the blaster away in her sash. Four-year-old Jyn looks up at Saw and sticks her fingers in her mouth, staring at the giant of a man she does not yet know will eventually become the center of her galaxy. Twenty-eight-year-old Lyra presses her face to her daughter’s braids and squeezes her eyes tightly shut, her mouth forming the name of the husband she has just promised to kill.

Then she lifts her head abruptly and turns back to Saw, and Jyn doesn’t need to read her lips to understand what she’s asking because she remembers, somehow, impossibly, she hears her mother’s voice just over her head, her side warm against Mama’s belly and her fingers wet in her mouth,  _You will see Jyn safe for me. I will give up everything else for this, Saw, but not her. Never her. You keep my baby safe for me._

Saw bows his head, and his hand shifts from Lyra’s shoulder to Jyn’s braided head.

Something is beeping.

Jyn raises her head from her arms and realizes several things at once. She’s huddled against the cave wall with her knees drawn up and her arms tight around them. The light is the same but the cave is distinctly colder, the sounds of night trickling down from the nearby entrance. She’s alone. Her eyes are wet. Her face is stiff with salt. Her comm is beeping.

Her comm is beeping a lot.

Shit!

Jyn fumbles for the device, notes the message queue is almost full. She flips it on and says in a hoarse voice, “Cassian?”

“ _Jyn!”_ His voice cracks with static and panic in her ear, and Jyn rushes to turn the volume down before anyone overhears him blaring from her comm. “ _Where are you? Are you alright?”_

“’m fine,” she croaks, winces at the terrible sound of her voice, and is unsurprised to hear Cassian’s tone turn less frantic and more professional.

_“Switch your transponder to transmit, I’ll lock the coordinates.”_

Kriffing hells, she thinks tiredly. Now he’s really worried. “I’m fine,” she repeats in a clearer voice, as firmly as she can manage. “Sorry I’m late.”

 _“Where are you?”_ His voice is relentlessly calm, almost brisk.  _“Please turn on your transponder.”_

“I’m in a cave near the Census Bureau,” Jyn tells him, leveraging herself up from the floor and scrubbing her face with her sleeve before she heads for the cave entrance. “I got…distracted. I’ll just…I’ll just hop the railcar and be back at the port in about an hour. Or so. Depending on traffic.”

 _“Jyn,”_  Cassian replies flatly.  _“Turn on the transponder.”_  She sighs, flips the little switch on the side of the comm, and waits a beat until she hears,  _“Received. I’ll meet you in the last rail station.”_

“Our landing visa is going to expire soon,” Jyn reminds him, checking her chrono and wincing. “If you’re in the ship they probably won’t impound it. Just stay there. I’ll be an hour at most.”

“If you’re not here in exactly one standard hour,” he says after a long moment, “I will come looking, and I will come armed.”

Jyn snorts, tucks her kyber tightly under her shirt collar and brushes her fingertip across her comm before dropping her hand. The irony of this conversation is not lost on her. “Keep your comm open.”

The streets are mostly empty when she surfaces, just a few shadowy figures with her heads bent as they stride quickly through the neighborhood towards the few cheap restaurants or the nearby rail station. The lights outside the cave are just as weak and poorly maintained as the ones inside, but there are significantly more of them, and their reflections turn the pale blue crystal of the city into a deep blue filled with distorted yellow stars. In the dark, she can’t see the trash piles or the creaky benches, and it gives her the slightly dizzying impression of falling upward through the night sky as she walks. It’s the prettiest slum Jyn’s ever seen, but it still feels like a bad place to hang out alone at night.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly over the comm as she nears the rail station. “I lost track of time.”

There’s a long pause, and then Cassian asks softly in her ear,  _“Did you find what you were looking for?”_

Jyn smiles a little, which pulls at her grief-tightened skin and feels odd but…freeing. In a way. “I was never going to find family here,” she tells him mildly (she’s too tired to be bitter any more). “And anyway, I already have one, thanks.”

There’s a faint sound like someone clearing their throat, then,  _“That doesn’t really answer the question.”_

No, it doesn’t, but she doesn’t know how to explain what she was really looking for, doesn’t know if she found it, doesn’t know if it matters anyway. Lyra Erso died a long time ago, and Jyn was too young to understand either her life or her death.

And yet...

Jyn catches the railcar down to the valley just before it pulls away, and is grateful that the car is mostly empty already. She huddles in the far corner away from the other passengers and pulls her comm close to her mouth. “I’ll tell you about it when I get there,” she says at last. “Just,” she inhales deeply, exhales, “just don’t leave without me.” She tries to make it sound light, a breezy joke. 

“Never,” Cassian says immediately in a serious tone, and the weight she was ignoring on her heart drops away. Jyn wraps her arms around her waist and lets herself believe him. “I’ll be here, Jyn. Come back safe, and I’ll be here.”

It turns out that Jyn already has family, both those she’s lost and those she’s found. She might never know much about the former, she might never get the chance to know everything about the latter. The war has taken much, it might take more. 

And yet...

 _The story is this, dearest, that there once was a geologist who loved her family very much,_ Mama says as she ties off the ends of her braids.

 _“Come home, Jyn,”_  Cassian murmurs in her ear.

Jyn touches her mother’s crystal and shoves a wayward strand of hair back into her messy bun, and smiles. “I will,” she promises. “I’m on my way.”

**Author's Note:**

> This story is a structural mess, but I needed to get it out of my head. It always bothered me that Lyra was never mentioned again, after she died, and that while Jyn clearly still bears some link to her (the crystal, and how often she touches it), I'm just tired of Star Wars moms getting the short end of the story shaft. 
> 
> Also, just to clarify, the cave Jyn finds in the poorer district of Celestine is not a "pure" kyber cave, or else the Empire would have mined it. It does, however, have some bits and pieces buried in the cheaper, less vaunted stone, and I like to think that Lyra's necklace maybe remembers where it came from, and the girl who grew up near it.


End file.
